# Introduction

## What is Lightrail?

Lightrail is an open-source AI command bar & workflow platform that seeks to simplify software development. It is designed to be a general-purpose, extensible platform for integrating LLM-based tooling into engineering/development workflows. It does this by focusing on three components of working with LLMs: Providing sources of context, constructing effective prompts, and interfacing with external services.

Lightrail accomplishes these goals through an extension framework called Tracks. Tracks can provide `Tokens`, which are sources of dynamically generated context for a prompt, as well as `Actions`, which are functions that can modify a prompt, send it to an LLM, and use the LLM's response to execute functionality. All Lightrail functionality is delivered via the Tracks system, so a plain install of the Lightrail Core is essentially non-functional. Therefore, Lightrail's default installation includes a few commonly used tracks (Chat, VSCode, Chrome). More tracks are in development and will be installable through the Lightrail application.
